Jane Elliott

A rural Iowa schoolteacher becomes a national voice against racism after leading a controversial 1968 lesson in discrimination with her all-white third-grade class. Now nearly 90, she refuses to hold back amid today’s fights about race, history, and power after a lifetime of speaking out.

In BLUE-EYED, we join a group of 40 teachers, police, school administrators and social workers in Kansas City - blacks, Hispanics, whites, women and men. The blue-eyed members are subjected to pseudo-scientific explanations of their inferiority, culturally biased IQ tests and blatant discrimination. In just a few hours under Ms. Elliott's withering regime, we watch grown professionals become despondent and distracted, stumbling over the simplest commands.

The very first documentary about Jane Elliott's educational experiment about discrimination, which was originally produced for ABC News, in which she conducts an unforgettable lesson with her third-grade class in Riceville, Iowa.

Jane Elliott, an internationally acclaimed diversity champion, conducts her Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed Exercise in Glasgow, Scotland with thirty-five volunteers from across the United Kingdom. Many of the blue-eyed participants were shocked at their own reactions to what for many of them was the new experience of being powerless. Many of the brown-eyed participants were shocked at how easy they found it to go along with what was happening even though they knew it was wrong. They all have a better understanding of the systematic nature of racism as well as the awareness of how their actions or inaction can reinforce and perpetuate it. Eye Opener shows this exercise is as relevant and necessary in the UK today as it was in Riceville, Iowa in 1968.

William Peters follows up on the 1970 TV documentary Eye of the Storm about Jane Elliott's experiment of dividing an otherwise homogenous group of school kids by their eye color. The episode intercuts footage from Eye of the Storm with new footage of the students, who are now adults. The film takes us through the journey of a young class learning the unfairness of racism. Elliot teaches the lesson through eye color and different treatment. All of the students admit that this is wrong. In footage of the students as adults, we are able to see how this shaped the experiment changed their lives.

Are we more racist than we realise? Former teacher Jane Elliot recreates her controversial exercise, as volunteers experience inequality based on eye colour, testing their susceptibility to bigotry.

Jane Elliott brings her brown-eye/blue-eye diversity training to Australia, where she explores racism between Aboriginal and white Australians.

“Even nice Canadians are racist…” That's Jane Elliott’s starting point as she welcomes and bullies 22 Canadians who volunteered to participate in her renowned workshop. With camera rolling, Elliott divides the unsuspecting participants by eye color – blue eye in one group, brown eyes (many of them Native Canadian) in the other. Elliott turns the tables on the participants, treating the blue eyes as “persons of color,” confronting and browbeating them, while the brown eyes are treated with respect. It illustrates and exposes how systemic racism develops.

39 people have agreed to participate in a self-experiment, without knowing exactly what to expect. In the anti-racism training, the participants are divided on the basis of their eye color in two groups. The blue-eyed will be humiliated, while the brown-eyed will learn how strong the feeling of having power can be and how much it unsettled.

This documentary shows Jane Elliott's blue-eyed/brown-eyed experiment set in a college environment with students from diverse racial and ethnic environments.